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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems

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To: cheryl williamson who wrote (17481)	6/30/1999 9:57:00 PM
From: Stormweaver	Read Replies (1) of 64865

Just finished whippin some dead horse (as Mike said) ... Since you run all that freeBSD stuff Cheryl your bound to know what a /dev/tty is ? And your bound to know what this means... $export TERM=vt100 Back before UNIX was an affordable desktop and when PC's were very expensive "Dumb Terminals" were a popular cheap alternative. Dumb Terminals connected directly to UNIX machine serial ports (ie. /dev/tty1); or via Terminal Servers. They are essentially a cheap monochrome CRT screen, keyboard and of course the serial line host connection; nothing else. These devices came in various flavours (escape sequences varied; terminal type) ie. DEC VT100, VT220, VT320. I see the JavaStation and similar appliances as gussied up Dumb Terminals. Quicker net connection, colour screen but essentially an inert box that depends on a network and server that is up 100% of the time and needs to bootstrap/download any information from a server to be able to do anything. If the JavaStation/netappliance wool could be pulled over everybody's eyes then Sun could sell a lot of iron at a high margin and a bunch of un-upgradeable proprietary inert desktop heaters. Luckily the competition and hence the inovation cycles are happening in the PC desktop space. Power/storage is becoming cheaper there. Software architected for the desktop that is here NOW is generations ahead of anything that is even being dreamed up now for the netappliance model. James

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